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as one of annan’s advisors told a
journalist, he “runs the u.n. like an old
fashioned african village, with long
discussions among the elders, periods of
reflection and eventually a decision.”
We develop leaders, and we develop countries. Or so
we believe. We also believe that we develop countries
by developing leaders. Perhaps we need to develop our
thinking.
Questions for development
When I visited Ghana, having spent little time in
Africa, I came with the usual question: How can such
a “developing” country be developed? But something
troubled me about this formulation. Did it have to do
with the word “developing” – so often a euphemism
for the absence of economic development? Do coun-
tries stop developing because outsiders are so intent
on developing them?
I was the guest of the Kweku Hutchful Foundation
of Ghana, which had invited me with a different
question: How can Ghanaian leaders be developed?
Something troubled me about this formulation too.
That word again. Do we really “develop” leaders? On
my second day, three Ghanaian colleagues and I were
walking through the botanical gardens near Accra
when one of them asked me what I thought of multi-
national enterprises. Not much, at least in places like
this, I answered, knowing where that question was
coming from. That led the Ghanaians into a discussion
of why there had to be so much control of domes-
tic operations by foreign headquarters. Do they really
understand the local needs? Just because some “best
practice” works in New York, does that mean it will
work in Accra? They felt that even many of the inter-
national NGOs and “development” agencies, not only
the IMF, act in much the same way.
We mused about how American managers might
react to consultants arriving from Ghana with their
“best practice”: “It worked in Accra so it is bound to
work in New York!” Then we realised there was a
prominent example of just that.
Leadership as heroic or engaging?
That same example came up the very next day when
I visited Dr. Kwame Bediako at what was described to
me as his centre for developing leaders. So I expected to
Henry Mintzberg is Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in
Montréal, Canada, and co-founder of Coaching Ourselves. He is the author of many books
about management and leadership including Managers not MBAs and the recently published
Managing. The following article has been updated from the original, published in 2007.
Henry Mintzberg
Developing Leaders? Developing Countries?
March 2010 • Volume 1, Issue 2
shifting the trajectory of civilisation
Oxford
Le ad ership
J ou r n a l
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2. • Oxford Leadership Journal | Shifting the trajectory of civilization
get a good dose of empowerment, team building, and
all the rest of that leadership jargon. But Dr. Bediako
turned out to be a theologian, astute and well-published,
concerned with moral leadership. He was especially
interested in the African and Ghanaian approach to
leadership. “So how do you teach leadership here?” I
asked, and he shot back “We just show it.”
The same telling example that Dr. Bediako brought
up was a fellow Ghanaian named Kofi Annan, who had
“shown it” rather profoundly in New York, in perhaps
the most difficult organisation in that city, the United
Nations. Here is a truly global organisation that had
improved remarkably under his stewardship, although
hardly in the fashionable style of “turning around” so
many of New York’s ostensibly global corporations.
Annan may have spent most of his career outside of
Ghana, and had some of his higher education in the
United States, but to Dr. Bediako, who was at school
with him, his approach to leadership was decidedly
African and Ghanaian. As one of Annan’s advisors
told a journalist, he “runs the U.N. like an old fashioned
African village, with long discussions among the elders,
periods of reflection and eventually a decision.”
To describe Annan’s style, Dr. Bediako talked about
traditions of service, honesty, and modesty – hardly
labels one would use for those corporate chief exec-
utives pulling down huge bonuses in New York. Of
course, he could hardly control his organisation the
way they control theirs, doing the great deals and
imposing the grand strategies on everyone else. But
perhaps he knew better. He had, after all, spent his
career in the organisation he ran; he was not parachut-
ed in from above and beyond: Kofi Annan was the first
career employee to head up the U.N. So he knew what
was wrong and appreciated that it had to be fixed care-
fully and patiently, by engaging the staff rather than
intimidating them. Kofi Annan listens, Dr. Bediako
said, and brings people together, no simple matter in
the tangle of relationships that surrounds and infuses
the United Nations. Words prominently used for his
tenure included moral and courageous.
Accordingly, Kofi Annan’s re-election to a second
term came with the support of nations all over the
world, rich and poor, as well as of the U.N. staff itself.
Imagine the leader of an organisation chosen with
reference to the led! But, as Dr. Bediako pointed out,
that kind of recognition is what makes someone a
leader.
The leadership style so prevalent in the United
States today might be termed “heroic”: the great
one imposed on the wayward organisation to turn it
around, dramatically – all too often by firing much of
its staff. How much honesty, let alone moral courage,
does that take? I think of true leaders as engaging: they
engage others with their thoughtfulness and humility
because they engage themselves in what they are doing
– and not for personal gain. Such leaders bring out the
energy that exists naturally within people. If there is
a heroic dimension to their behavior, it is not by acting
heroically so much as by enabling other people to act
heroically. Is this kind of leadership developed? Was
Kofi Annan “developed?” Do these “developing” coun-
tries – or “developed ones” for that matter – need to
develop heroic leaders?
Time for indigenous development?
After I had spent some time in the countryside and
met various people, the Hutchful Foundation organ-

3. Volume 1, Issue 2 • March 2010 •
ised a workshop over a day and a half to discuss the
issues of leadership and development. This brought
together about twenty Ghanaians from all sectors: the
Ministry of Health, the National Union of Students,
the Employers Association, a variety of NGOs –
Ghanaian and international – as well as entrepreneurs,
academics, and consultants
By this time, my concerns about both forms of
development were becoming clearer, and I discussed
them with the group. Perhaps we don’t develop leaders
so much as foster the conditions that bring leadership
out, in context. And key among these conditions has
to be the self-respect that derives from working things
out for ourselves, individually and collectively. And
that, in turn, is fostered by organisations that can like-
wise stand on their own feet and find their own ways
of doing things, building on the best of their own
cultural traditions.
The passive importation of techniques, controls,
and beliefs, via outside agencies and experts that run
around solving everyone else’s problems, may be the
very problem of development. Globalisation certain-
ly develops the “global” corporations of the wealthy
world. But does globalisation develop the poor coun-
tries of the developing world? Or is globalisation just
another form of outside exploitation, of which Africa
has had more than its share? Is it, therefore, time for
indigenous development, of countries and leaders
alike?
From enterprise to enterprises
One thing seemed clear. Ghana does not lack enter-
prise. Go into its streets, and you are struck by the
pervasiveness of markets and personal initiative,
Two Ways to Manage
Heroic Leadership Engaging Management
Managers are important people, quite apart from
others who develop products and deliver services
Managers are important to the extent that they
help other people to be important
The higher “up” these managers go, the more impor-
tant they become. At the “top,” the chief executive is
the corporation
An organisation is an interacting network, not a
vertical hierarchy. Effective leaders work through-
out; they do not sit on top
Down the hierarchy comes the strategy – clear, delib-
erate, and bold – emanating from the chief who takes
the dramatic acts. Everyone else “implements.”
Out of the network emerge strategies, as engaged
people solve little problems that grow into big
initiatives
Implementation is the problem because while the
chief embraces change, most others resist it. That is
why outsiders must be favoured over insiders
Implementation is the problem because it cannot be
separated from formulation. That is why commit-
ted insiders are necessary to resist ill-considered
charges imposed from above and without
To manage is to make decisions and allocate resourc-
es – including those human resources. Managing
thus means analyzing, often calculating, based on
facts, from reports
To manage is to bring out the energy that exists
naturally within human beings. Managing thus
means engaging, based on judgment, rooted in
context
Rewards for increasing performance go to the leader-
ship. What matters is what’s measured, shareholder
value in particular
Rewards for making the organisation a better place
go to everyone. Human values matter, few of which
can be measured
Leadership is thrust upon those who thrust their
will on others
Leadership is a sacred trust earned from the respect
of others

4. • Oxford Leadership Journal | Shifting the trajectory of civilization
more than enough to put America to shame. At a red
light in New York, you might be approached by a
squeegee kid or two; in Accra, your car is surrounded
by a virtual supermarket of people trying to sell you
everything imaginable.
What Ghana lacks is enterprises. With the success
of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, so called micro-
financing – lending small sums to self‑employed
craftspeople and the like – has become the prominent
example of indigenous development. But development
at that level may not be the problem, any more than
imposed development at the corporate level. The
need seems to exist at some level between the two:
indigenous enterprises incorporated beyond the
efforts of a few individuals – what has been called
the “missing middle.” I happened to have stopped in
northern Italy on my way to Ghana, and Carlo Alberto
Carnevale of the Bocconi School of Management
took me to Bergamo. It is the richest city in one of
the wealthiest parts of Europe, he said, and most of
the wealth was built by small, indigenous enterprises,
often with just a dozen or so people. “We Italians don’t
like organisation,” he said, and agreed when I replied
that “You like community.” Stock option incentives
probably figure less prominently here than elsewhere
in the developed west, he explained. What really
drives the people is the opportunity to go out on their
own, to be entrepreneurs. And the existing enterprises
often help their people do that, by turning employees
into partners. (Nearby Benetton has become famous for
generating many enterprises around it.) So here, deep
inside the European Union, is evidence of another
approach to economic development, quite aside from
globalisation (although companies such as Benetton
certainly benefit from it).
The dogma of development
Sometimes a conceptual framework can help us to see
the obvious, especially when it is obscured by dogma.
So at the workshop, these ideas were elaborated more
formally, as the three models shown in the accompa-
nying figure, to help get us beyond “developing coun-
tries” and “globalisation.”
Two models of national development have become
popular in turn. The first, labelled planned develop-
ment in the figure, is shown as “top down” because it is
driven by the state, whether the central planning and
control of communist governments or the extensive
intervention of more moderate ones to create infra-
structure. With the fall of the communist regimes,
accompanied by the discrediting of state intervention,
a second model, of international or global development

5. Volume 1, Issue 2 • March 2010 •
after the fall of communism, globalism
become the only model in town, so to
speak. it became the answer to all the
world’s problems, development included.
– so called globalisation – replaced it, as the answer to
all economic needs. From a belief that the state must
drive development came the attitude that the state must
stay out of it, other than to ensure contract law and
accounting procedures, etc. The rest would be taken
care of by corporations, foreign as well as domestic, on
that so-called “level playing field.” Note that globalisa-
tion means not only the taking down of trade barriers,
but the full opening up of economies to foreign direct
investment and outside enterprises and experts of all
kinds. This has certainly sounded good to the multi-
nationals and their home country governments, not to
mention the free-market economists.
But many other people, without such convenient
self-interest or ideological conviction, have been less
sure. And they have hardly been encouraged by the
aggressiveness with which the wealthy countries have
forced this ideology on the poorer ones. The wealthy
countries are in effect selling their own manufactured
goods while closing their own markets to many of the
products developing countries can sell – in agriculture
and textiles, for example. It is really quite startling how
anyone could have tolerated this hypocrisy at all, let
alone most of the world for so many years. The issue is
not whether honest economists decry such behaviour
– of course they have. It is how these economists could
have pursued the free trade agenda so doggedly in the
presence of such distortions.
Of course, there is one obvious explanation as to
why people on the receiving end have tolerated this:
conceptually they have had nowhere else to turn. After
the fall of communism, globalism became the only
model in town, so to speak. It became the answer to
all the world’s problems, development included. With
what theory was any developing country going to
stand up to the likes of the IMF or the WTO, let alone
The Economist, issue after issue? How else to develop a
modern economy?
The failure of forced development
This form of development is labelled “outside in” on
the diagram, not only because the foreign corpora-
tions descend on the host economy with their money
and their experts, but also because even the domestic
firms are supposed to subscribe to this imported set of
beliefs. There is nothing in globalisation that responds
to host country conditions, except cosmetic modifica-
tions to products and ideology. Indeed, the ideology
treats local communities, often even democratically-
elected national governments, as threats to globalisa-
tion, and therefore as forces to be marginalised.
For more reasons than this, however, the globalisa-
tionideologyisseriouslyflawed.Ithasflatlynotworked
in many of the places in greatest need of develop-
ment. Perhaps this can be explained by the comments
above: globalisation does not build on a country’s
unique strengths, respect its social traditions, or allow
the autonomy necessary to grow indigenous leaders
and enterprises. All too often, it is forced development,
imposed against the natural inclinations and will of
the people. Is that any way to foster a developmental
mindset, let alone a democratic society? Pride, dignity,
and corresponding confidence do not figure promi-
nently in mainline economic theory; these cannot be
measured. But they figure prominently in just about
every story of success, whether of countries or of
leaders. How people feel about themselves, personally
and collectively, influences the energy with which they
develop themselves. Think about Great Britain during
its empire, Japan of the 1970s and 1980s, the United
States throughout its history. Of course, the first and
last of these examples suggest how the pride of one
country can undermine the pride of others.
The trouble with the outside-in model is that it is
based on imitation, and imitations are often second
rate, because copying is a mindless activity. People
don’t learn. This is not to argue that learning cannot
be stimulated by the experience of others. Quite the
contrary, some of the best learning is informed by that
experience.
Japan was famous for copying after World War Two,
but its economy “took off ” when it grew beyond that,
from the mindlessness of imitating to the thoughtful-
ness of adapting, by tailoring the innovations of other
countries to its own culture. We learn from others
when we do it for ourselves.

6. • Oxford Leadership Journal | Shifting the trajectory of civilization
One last point about globalisation. Is it even
working for those countries so intent on promoting it?
Put differently, are developed economies being further
developed by their large multinational enterprises
functioning according to this model? This is a complex
question that I can hardly answer here. But a good deal
of recent evidence certainly gives cause for concern.
We know about the key role of small and medium
enterprises in job creation, especially when they work
in cooperative local networks, as in Northern Italy. We
also know about the driving force of new technolo-
gies, which come largely from the developing enter-
prises of the so-called “new economy” more than from
the developed ones of the old. Indeed, it is from the
developed ones that we have been getting the litany
of recent scandals, whether as outright corruption or
simple strategic failure.
A good deal of the blame for both can be placed on
a key component of globalisation, namely its obsession
with “shareholder value,” which is just a fancy label for
pushing up the price of the stock. Shareholder “value”
hardly promotes broader human values, which are so
necessary in all forms of development. Consider, in
America, the casual dismissal of people at the drop
of share price, the shame of executive compensation
that has destroyed the leadership of so many corpo-
rations, the corruption of politics through corporate
donations. If America has succumbed to this ideology-
turned-dogma, how is a Ghana supposed to cope?
The triumph of balance
We are certainly dependent on economic forces, just
as we are dependent on social and political ones. But
we have allowed the economic forces to dominate the
others because of our mistaken belief that capitalism
triumphed over communism – in other words, that the
markets of economics proved their superiority over
the controls of governments. The fact is that capital-
ism never triumphed at all. Balance triumphed. Under
the communism of Eastern Europe, the political power
of the state dominated. The wealthy countries of
the west, in contrast, combined strong markets with
influential governments and vibrant social sectors..
But in the mistaken belief about market supremacy,
the western countries are now going out of balance
in favour of markets, the private sector, and economic
forces in general. The result is a mindless corruptive
greed increasingly reminiscent of communism itself.
So the key to healthy development, whether in
a rich country or a poor one, is a certain balance of
the economic, the social, and the political. And that
requires the recognition of a third model, labelled
indigenous development. It is shown in the figure as
“inside-up” because here domestic enterprises grow
out of personal enterprise. This model is not meant
to replace the other two–we have no need for another
dogma–but to take a prominent place alongside them.
For it is in the combined applications of the three
models that the real success stories can be found.
Consider the greatest economic success story of
them all. The United States did not depend on an
imposed ideology or outside experts for its develop-
ment. Quite the contrary, it developed significantly
through the indigenous efforts of its own people, in
their own way. But not alone. The state was there
too, and it intervened significantly: in land grants to
farmers, railroads, and mining companies; with indus-
trial policies and direct government funding for fledg-
ling industries; through military spending that stimu-
lated the economy; and, of course, by the use of tariff
barriers.
There was also some direct foreign investment,
for example by the British in the American railroads.
Likewise, indigenous development played a key role in
Japan and Germany after World War Two, in South
Korea more recently, and Great Britain long before.
And this was likewise reinforced by the strong inter-
vention of the state, most notably in Japan, which also
allowed a certain amount of outside-in – but on its
own terms.

7. Volume 1, Issue 2 • March 2010 • 1
Author’s note: After the first publication of this article, Ireland used to be cited to me as a counterexample. I
replied at the time that the country was developed to begin with when it opened itself fully up. Given what’s
happened recently, no one cites that example any more.
to dump this globalisation dogma on
these countries, therefore, is just plain
unconscionable. shame on all of us for
allowing our economists and corporations
to perpetrate this self-serving sham in the
name of development.”
Let me express this critical point in the form of
the following question: Has any country ever developed
primarily through the outside-in model based on the whole-
sale importation of beliefs, expertise, and capital? Clear
examples are difficult to find. So why are the developed
countries forcing on others a model that never worked
for themselves?1
The sham of globalisation in the
name of development
The answer to how else to develop a modern economy
thus seems to be: as always, namely in the very way
modern economies themselves became modern
– through a great deal of indigenous development,
supported by the concerted intervention of the state,
reinforced by the appropriate use of outside help.
Alice Amsden, professor of political economy at
MIT, asked “what enabled those companies in develop-
ing countries that have been dramatically successful to
grow and flourish?” Her answer: “… in their countries,
business and government worked closely together to
strengthen domestic industry. Foreign enterprises
were discouraged, by deliberate red tape, from enter-
ing certain industries, so that national companies
could get a head start. State-owned banks lent money
at subsidised rates to help local firms acquire the tech-
nologies and capital equipment they needed.” Yet now,
nations must “disallow government intervention in the
economy beyond establishing minimal norms,” and,
according to new WTO proposals, must “void [the
right] to regulate multinationals and promote domes-
tic businesses.” In other words, they must forfeit the
“freedom [that] has been critical to most economic
modernisations that have had any lasting success.”
A nice little game this is: deny others the very basis
for your own success. Level the playing field so that
the New York Giants can take on some high school
team from Accra, on their turf with our game. And
in so doing, promote the further success of your own
economy, even if that has to be on the backs of some
of the world’s poorest people.
To dump this globalisation dogma on these coun-
tries, therefore, is just plain unconscionable. Shame on
all of us for allowing our economists and corporations
to perpetrate this self-serving sham in the name of
development. For years, we used communism as our
excuse for economic colonialism. Now it is “free trade.”
This is not to dismiss the outside-in model any more
than the other two. Foreign corporations can bring
in fresh ideas, modern techniques, and new processes;
they can provide certain financing; and they can allow
for the scale necessary in some contemporary forms
of manufacturing. But this has to be done on the host
country’s own terms, for only it can ever look after its
own interests. In other words, the outside-in model has
to be discredited only as the answer to development,
not as a component of it. Of course, the same must be
true for the other two models, namely top-down state
intervention and inside-up indigenous development,
which is the especially weak link in so many poor
countries today.
From micro to middle enterprises
Accordingly, the issue on which we focused our work-
shop in Accra was breaking through what is shown
in the figure as “the enterprise barrier,” going from
micro to middle enterprises. As Dr. Bediako had put
it, “We suffer from a lack of institution building.” We
began by searching for examples of indigenous devel-
opment, namely companies that had broken through
this barrier in a decisive way, and could therefore serve
as role models. Initially, there was silence in the room;
no -one could think of any! Then an interesting thing
happened. As one example came up, more followed,
and soon there was an outpouring of stories. The
problem, apparently, is not the absence of indigenous
development so much as its obscurity: we get blinded
by the multinational stars. (Right before our eyes, in
fact. The most evident example never even came up. I
was struck by the beauty of the hotel we were in – this
was no ordinary fancy global hotel. I learned later that
it was built by two Ghanaians who had worked as taxi
drivers in the United States before coming home and

8. • Oxford Leadership Journal | Shifting the trajectory of civilization
we have allowed the economic forces
to dominate the others because of our
mistaken belief that capitalism triumphed
over communism – in other words,
that the markets of economics proved
their superiority over the controls of
governments. the fact is that capitalism
never triumphed at all. balance triumphed.
establishing some smaller hotels, eventually to put
together the financing for this one.)
As the examples came out, we ordered them into
various approaches to indigenous enterprise develop-
ment, to suggest the richness of the possibilities. The
most obvious is the family enterprise. This is usually
thought of as small and marginal, indeed vulnerable at
times of succession. Yet much of the development of
Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore has involved family
enterprises grown to enormous scale. And so too has
it been with some of the most prominent corporations
of India, and earlier America, for that matter, includ-
ing DuPont and (still) Johnson’s Wax.
A second approach we called spin-off, because one
enterprise spins off entrepreneurs who create others,
as in the story of northern Italy. Other examples raised
at the workshop included the Korean immigrants in
America and the Ibo of Nigeria, who help each other
start enterprises, also certain multinationals in Ghana
that have encouraged this. Spin-off development
creates a kind of crystalline growth of the economy.
Another is the cooperative approach, where people
band together in some sort of community to pool their
economic efforts. The label cooperative has a negative
connotation in many developing countries, where it
became an excuse for state intervention. But here we
had in mind true cooperatives, controlled by members
each of whom has an equal share that cannot be sold
to others.
Similar is what we called the network approach,
because the cooperation extends beyond formal
ownership. People connect to do their business, much
as they do around the world in that network called the
World Wide Web. Ghana, for example, has its “market
queens,” who draw sellers of particular commodities
into informal affiliations, which sometimes raise money
for their common goals.
We also discussed the fostering of indigenous devel-
opment through the building of capabilities. There is
certainly a key role for government here, by helping
to make financing available, establishing a legal frame-
work conducive to the creation of domestic enterpris-
es, disseminating key information, and encouraging all
kinds of networks to carry this on. Examples were also
provided of how social sector organisations – NGOs
and various trade associations, etc. – can help, especial-
ly in encouraging networking and the dissemination
of information. Hope was expressed that more foreign
corporations could be encouraged to act in similar
ways, by promoting indigenous enterprises that could
serve them as solid partners. There are good examples
of this – and need to be many more.
We also need to see more examples of cooperation
among different sectors of countries. The support
of “community” is especially important in economic
development.
For example, my colleague at McGill, Paola Perez-
Aleman, has shown how the footwear industry and
agro-industry in Chile have achieved considerable
success through “the relations between firms; the
reorientation of trade associations; and the state’s role
as facilitator of collective learning processes.” Key to
this, in her view, are non-profit associations in the social
sector that draw the players together. In fact, another
colleague, Margaret Graham, has shown something
similar in the relationship between American govern-
ment and industry in the successful introduction of
aluminium to aircraft in the 1920s.
Earlier I referred to the “missing middle,” about
which there has been some discussion. For example,
economist Paul Vandenberg of the International
Labour Office has noted that “Manufacturing in much
of Africa is structured around a number of large inte-
grated firms, using foreign technology, at one end, and
many smaller indigenous firms, at the other. In between
there is a relative vacuum or missing middle which
has been identified but not adequately explained.” He
wrote this in 1997; it apparently remains inadequate-
ly explained today although there is no shortage of
proposed reasons, ranging from an underdeveloped
middle class and the domination of the multinationals

9. Volume 1, Issue 2 • March 2010 •
to domestic government corruption. But one thing is
clear: we shall find no answers by looking in the wrong
place.
Forced development is the wrong place. Imagine if
some of the enormous amount of energy and intellect
now devoted to the promotion of globalisation went
into finding ways to develop these missing middles.
Fostering leadership
Where does this leave us with developing leaders?
About where it has left us with developing countries.
Outside programs no more develop leaders than
outside institutions develop countries. Indeed, the
more we try to develop leaders, the more we seem to
get hubris.
Perhaps that is because singling people out to be
developed as leaders encourages that heroic view of
leadership, out of context instead of rooted in it. We
have had quite enough of self-indulgence in the name
of leadership lately.
Jay Conger published an interesting book entitled
Learning to Lead about short leadership development
courses. He took four of them himself, in each of the
main approaches, which he labelled personal growth,
conceptual understanding, feedback, and skill building.
He found that all had significant flaws, but concluded
that together they may be effective. Perhaps he should
have concluded that the very notion of developing
leaders is flawed.
If leaders cannot be developed, then what can be
done? Three things, I believe.
First, leadership can be fostered, much like economic
development. In other words, we can foster the condi-
tions that give rise to indigenous leadership, particu-
larly those of thoughtful self-reliance. A key reason
why globalisation is dysfunctional for developing
countries is that it fosters a kind of dependency anti-
thetical to the emergence of indigenous leadership.
Fostering leadership depends significantly on context:
it is the person in the situation gives rise to leader-
ship. As Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. Ambassador
to the United Nations, put it, “Kofi Annan is the right
man at the right time from the right place.” Of course,
right places can be encouraged. Morgan McCall of the
University of Southern California, who has written
extensively on how leaders learn in their jobs, stresses
that people should be offered challenges in a variety of
difficult jobs, which leaves them “little chance but to
learn and develop new abilities.”
Second, people can be developed. Not as leaders, but
as human beings, in their beliefs and behaviours,
their thoughtfulness and self-respect. But that prob-
ably happens mostly in the early years, at home and in
school. We do, after all, raise children, not just have
them. And this requires a culture that prizes basic
human values and educates children to think for them-
selves, to do what seems fundamentally right rather
than to accept some pat dogma. Dr. Bediako would no
doubt say that Kofi Annan is the product of a society
that takes its Christian beliefs seriously.
Third, we can develop managerial practice, not sepa-
rate from leadership but intrinsic to it. That separa-
tion just encourages the heroic view of leadership, up
on a pedestal, disconnected from the daily functioning
of the organisation. True leaders are in touch, on the
ground: they have to manage, just as managers have to
lead. We can encourage management development in
a classroom that brings managers together with their
colleagues to reflect thoughtfully on their own experi-
ence. They can, in other words, just show it to each
other! (For our own efforts in this regard, see www.
impm.org.)
Developing the developed
The people I met in Ghana, from all walks of life, were
mostly warm, considerate, and thoughtful. There was
a relaxed sense of equality in the places I visited. At
the workshop, everyone spoke up with no sense of a
pecking order; a person I invited to meet me there, who
had written to me as a student years earlier, walked
in and took a spare seat next to the minister. No one
seemed to notice. Ghana certainly needs to develop
economically; perhaps the “wealthy” West could stand
to develop socially.
At the workshop we discussed economic and social
development. Which is the driver? Economic forces
certainly drive social ones: material wealth helps to
sustain democracy, improve healthcare, and provide
education. But the social forces drive the economic
ones too: a deeply rooted sense of democracy seems
necessary for sustained economic development. The
two must work in tandem, like two feet walking, just

10. This article first appeared in Development
in Practice which offers practice-relevant
analysis and research relating to development
and humanitarianism, providing a worldwide
forum for the exchange of ideas and practical
experiences among practitioners, scholars,
policy shapers, and activists worldwide.
www.developmentinpractice.org
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as indigenous development must work with engaging
management.
Social development has certainly benefited from
economic development in the developed west – the
economically developed west. But are we sustaining that
relationship? Do shareholder value and heroic leader-
ship, etc. now promote, or do they undermine, social
development? Globalisation focuses on the econom-
ic and assumes that the social will follow obediently
behind. There is growing evidence, however, that the
opposite is now occurring: globalisation is weakening
our social structures and undermining our democratic
institutions. It is throwing our societies out of balance.
Will it, therefore, eventually weaken our economies
too?
“Unhappy is the land that has no heroes,” comments
a character in Bertolt Brecht’s play Life of Galileo.
“No,” replies another. “Unhappy is the land that needs
heroes.” If we can get past our need for heroic leader-
ship, and past the narrow metrics of our economists,
then perhaps we will be able to take a good look at
ourselves, instead of having to run around developing
others countries and leaders. Then, perhaps, we can
start back on the tricky road to developing balance.